Victoria Yi
Plant Stories
Published in
2 min readJan 30, 2023

--

I was thinking of a Chinese documentary called The Journey of Chinese Plants. It’s a documentary that was made back in 2019 and was broadcast on the CCTV documentary channel. Although I don’t usually watch much TV, my dad likes to watch documentaries on it, so I often sit next to him when I’m at home and watch it with him. We watched the TV together and talked about the various rare plants in the documentary is a good memory for me. I remember there were ten episodes of this documentary, and each episode had one plant category. For example, there was “Plant Paradise”, “Rice”, “Tea Tree”, “Bamboo” and so on. The storyline of each episode that I can still remember in my mind is: a certain plant originated somewhere in China, how difficult it was for them to fight against natural bad guys, and then how it shaped Chinese civilization and influenced world civilization. It feels like this narrative logic goes from natural geography to humanism and in a sense echoes or calls out the Chinese philosophy of a kind of unity of heaven and man, as well as some of the pride and cohesion that the narrative of Chinese civilization brings to the Chinese people. If I would like to go to research on that, I might do with visual-audio discourse analysis and to see how this documentary’s storyline or else echoes Chinese national pride and also the emotional emergence of greatness and also fit into the grand discourse of Chinese civilization revitalization.

--

--